Mr. Jim Dowdall:

On Deputy Billy Kelleher’s question about what steps are needed to incentivise people to join health insurance schemes, I spoke earlier about the need for a critical mass of insured members in the market to make health insurance affordable for everybody - the older, the younger, the healthier and the sicker individuals. The Health Insurance Authority, HIA, identified that if health insurance were affordable, more people would be attracted back into the market. The single largest component of health insurance cost is the health insurance levy. It is €760 for two adults and two children. This can be reduced. If it were, there would be an opportunity to attract people back into a market and making it more affordable and sustainable.

The Deputy also asked what policy decisions could be implemented to reduce the cost to insurers. There is a single biggest opportunity and there is a quick-win opportunity sitting there. The second relates to the setting of prices for the public hospitals. That is something on which there is no control and no negotiation capability. The Government, if it is serious about trying to make health insurance more affordable, can ensure that the scale of price increases that have been declared for health insurers over recent years reduces.

The Deputy asked the impact the risk equalisation scheme will have. Unfortunately, we are only a short number of weeks away from the end of the year when a permanent scheme needs to be implemented and we have not yet been provided with the detail on that scheme. That is something that disappoints all of the insurers. This was raised at a very late meeting with the Department of Health which took place last week. We do not have the detail of the scheme that will be implemented. In the limited level of detail that we were provided, we identified many holes.